Then, the sting. Heat runs sticky down one side of my face and neck. And me, still screaming orders through the chaos. “Move, move, move.”
I startle awake. A thin sheen of sweat chills in the barn air. I don’t know if I cried out, but I’m glad I didn’t risk it with her.
I sit up, head still tilting, the vision too real. I feel for my face and neck in the dark. Closed up. Healed. That’s when I know for sure Sloane Hale’s real, and this isn’t.
I swallow hard, mouth dry. My body aches. I groan as I stretch, old injuries more like complaints, bearing witness as if I’m not allowed to forget.
“Sloane Hale,” I say into the dark.
I don’t know why.
She’s Phoenix’s age, thirty to my thirty-six. And I wonder what her middle name is, though I don’t have a right to ask. Her hair dried warm chestnut with golden streaks after the rain. It curled at her temples in these little wisps I can’t stop thinking about.
And mixed in all of that are s’mores. She made me three. My tongue can still taste the saccharine of the marshmallows, dripping with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and the crunch of the graham crackers.
It’s been so long. Too long for those.
One should’ve been enough.
Three was dangerous.
Funny how deprivation rewires a man. Give him one good thing after years without it, and suddenly restraint stops mattering.
She licked marshmallow and chocolate off her fingertips. There was a smudge near the dimple on her cheek.
I pointed it out, trying not to look when her tongue darted out to get it.
My hand presses hard against my chest.
Don’t do this, Rhys.
But the image stays there anyway—too close, too real.
Not allowed.
I press harder, forcing it down. Because I’m the last person who should think like this. Who’s allowed to.
Phoenix told me to leave him. I did it to save the others.
That’s where it ends.
She’s too smart to leave it alone. Eventually, she’ll pull the whole thing apart. I know because I wrote the reports.
Sloane’s spent years searching for answers. But answers don’t make things better. Sometimes they ruin them.
And that I can’t do to her… or to Phoenix. Can’t leave him as he ended. Not when he’s remembered for what he was before.
I rise alone, turning the collar of my Carhartt up against the Colorado spring frost before heading out with a lantern. At the top of the ridge, I look back once. For just a moment. To the dark spot on the landscape where she sleeps warm and cozy.
I can still hear her breathing, hypnotizing, lulling. Almost drifted off a few times over that sound.
But I couldn’t let her hear what nights are like for me. What they’ll always be, I imagine.
As I trudge through the dark, checking traps along the line, my mind wanders. She asked about the tattoo on my arm. The coordinates. Stared too long as if she were memorizing it.
I’m sure she did because that’s who she is.
My heart thuds hollow in my chest. It’ll bring her pain, though I don’t mean it to.
